Dr Simidele Dosekun

Assistant Professor

Department of Media and Communications

About me

Dr. Simidele Dosekun is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. Her research centres African women to explore questions of gender, race, subjectivity, and power in a global context. Her work has appeared in Feminist Media Studies, Feminism and Psychology, Qualitative Inquiry, and Feminist Africa, among others. Before joining the department, she was a lecturer in media and cultural studies at the University of Sussex. She received her PhD in gender and cultural studies from King’s College London.

Dr. Dosekun’s first book, Fashioning Postfeminism: Spectacular Femininity and Transnational Culture, is forthcoming in 2020 from the University of Illinois Press. The book concerns young, class-privileged Nigerian women who dress in a hyperbolically feminine style. Based on interviews, it argues that these women see themselves as neoliberal postfeminist subjects – ‘already empowered,’ in short. The book offers a new conceptual and methodological understanding of postfeminism as a performative and transnationally mobile culture, and a closely theorised account of how women embody and, to some extent, suffer this culture in the flesh.

A second project is a book collection, African Luxury: Aesthetics and Politics, co-edited with Dr. Mehita Iqani of Wits University, published in 2019 by Intellect Books. With original case studies spanning the African continent, from Togo to the former Zaire to Angola, African Luxury: Aesthetics and Politics explores the visual and material cultures of different, extant forms of the production, consumption and representation of wealth, indulgence and lavishness there. It is the first book to focus on ‘luxury’ as a distinct category of consumption and practice in Africa.

Ongoing projects include a consideration of what the medium of fashion can offer African Studies methodologically, and black women’s subject positioning as media consumers and spectators.